The present invention relates to a replay device for a disk upon which is recorded a compressed video file which can be downloaded from a network, and to a compressed video file replay system.
A disk replay device has been proposed which is capable of recording the contents of a video which is protected by copyright upon an optical disk such as a CD or a DVD or the like, and which, moreover, permits these contents to be viewed only during a limited viewing period or only for a limited number of viewings.
For example, in the case of the device disclosed in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication 2002-112172, a device is disclosed which appends information including a limited number of times for viewing (i.e. copy management information) to contents (a compressed video file) downloaded from the internet or the like, and which only permits replay thereof up to this number of times.
Furthermore, in the cases of the devices disclosed in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication 2002-116856 and Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication 2003-259286, devices are also disclosed which, in the same manner, append information including a limited number of times for viewing (i.e. copy management information) to a compressed video file, and which only permit replay thereof up to this number of times.
However, with all of the replay devices disclosed in the Patent Documents described above, there remains the inconvenience that it is not possible for the user to know, at any time that he desires, the number of remaining times that it is possible to view the contents of the downloaded file. For the user to be able to know the number of remaining times that he can view the contents of the file, it is necessary for him to try to replay those contents. If an error occurs during this replay, for the first time, the user can understand that the remaining number of times is zero.
The object of the present invention is to provided a disk replay device, and a compressed video file replay system, with which, even without actually replaying the contents of a disk, it is possible to display the remaining number of times at the present time point that it is possible for the disk to be viewed.